Important Notice

In the years after he relocated from London to New York, F N Souza began producing a series of paintings in a bright colour palette, markedly different from the sombre works he had created only a few years prior. The present lot is among a series of portraits of patrons-such as American art collector Harold Kovner whom Souza first met in 1956-and other notable personalities that the artist painted during this period in the 1970s.

While... In the years after he relocated from London to New York, F N Souza began producing a series of paintings in a bright colour palette, markedly different from the sombre works he had created only a few years prior. The present lot is among a series of portraits of patrons-such as American art collector Harold Kovner whom Souza first met in 1956-and other notable personalities that the artist painted during this period in the 1970s.

While the vibrant palette and spontaneous brushwork share affinities with German Expressionists, such as Ernst Ludwig Krichener and Oskar Kokoscha, Souza introduces a contradictory element of the grotesque. He subverts the conventions of traditional portraiture-especially in European art-where likenesses were often idealised. As with his iconic ‘heads’ of the 1950s and 1960s, he disrupts the notions of aesthetic beauty, though in this painting, the distorted features of his earlier figures have been entirely eliminated. Critic Edwin Mullins remarks, “The parallel lines, cross-hatched on either side-an effective but rigid technique which he once used a great deal-have been largely replaced by freer techniques which permit a more directly emotional manner of painting. In particular, he often builds up an image by using a mass of loops and small circles of dark paint superimposed onto broad swathes of rich colour, so that although the image is never quite lost, its architectural formality dissolves into a kind of passionate dance.” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 30)

Most notably, Souza abandons the thick black outlines ubiquitous to his work and instead builds up an image with pigment squeezed straight from the tube, giving it an almost three-dimensional quality. The artist demonstrates remarkable technical mastery, skilfully balancing the tension between structure and impulse, order and chaos with a controlled hand and strong sense of draughtsmanship. Though he veers close to abstraction, Souza never loses sight of the human figure which remained central to his art. Says Mullins, “Figurative art presents no problems for Souza because he has succeeded in creating images which are entirely personal, yet recognisable at the same time. They are often distorted to the point of destruction [...] But they never threaten to dissolve into formalised abstract shapes. The violence and speed with which they are executed keep these images, however distorted, in touch with the painter’s vision of what they really are.” (Mullins, p. 38)

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